An American Civil Liberties Union representative, Ahilan Arulanantham, told the Senate Judiciary Committee about the trials many immigrants face in detention centers, including lack of access to legal counsel and sometimes years of detention. Though detention centers are not supposed to be prisons, Arulanantham said they operate as such.

“Nearly half the people in immigration prisons have never been convicted of any crime, and all of those who have been convicted finished serving their sentence before being transferred to immigration custody,” Arulanantham told the committee on Wednesday afternoon.

Arulanantham shared the story of a 32-year-old mentally handicapped man, Jose Franco Gonzalez who was the son of two lawful immigrants. After being sentenced for a year in jail after a fight, Franco Gonzalez was transferred to a detention facility to begin deportation proceedings. Though psychiatrists determined Franco Gonzalez lacked the mental capacity to defend himself, he never received legal counsel. Franco Gonzalez was then transferred to a detention facility, where he was incarcerated for four and a half years.

Immigrant detainees have no right to legal counsel because immigration offenses are considered a civil offense and not a criminal offense.

With the exception of those literally caught crossing the border, undocumented immigrants cannot be deported without a court decision. Those here legally, but convicted of a crime, can also only be deported after a decision from an immigration judge. In the past, many immigrants had failed to appear at their hearings. This led the government to increase detention rates, insuring appearances at hearings. However, the enormous backlog of immigrant cases has created long detentions such as Franco Gonzalez’s.

Arulanatham argued that detention is not necessary to insure appearance at hearings because the government can use technologies like ankle bracelets and GPS tracking.

The majority of the senators on the committee skipped the hearing, which took place on the day a budget resolution to fund the government for the next six months dominated Capitol Hill.

A law professor from Temple University, Jan Ting, pushed back against the advocacy that immigrants deserve legal counsel. Ting focuses on teaching immigration and citizenship law.

“I would be wary of advocating taxpayer funded lawyers for foreigners in civil litigation when under our current practice to united states citizens even in high stakes litigation,” Ting said.

Ting later argued that much of the problem in the current immigration debate stems from lawmakers who cannot decide between having a limited immigration system or having an “open borders” system.

A retired Immigration and Naturalization Services agent, Michael Cutler, said Congress needed to focus on border security. Cutler served for 30 years in the INS.

“We are constantly told that the immigration system is broken,” Cutler said. “What is never discussed is the fact that for decades the federal government has failed to effectively secure America’s borders and enforce and administer immigration laws. These failures convinced desperate people from around the world that the United States is not serious about its borders or its laws.”